All power to the Eagles, now keep the flag flying high

Thursday 1 December 2011 12:13 BST

Stuff of dreams: Darren Ambrose's opener was a stunner

Arsenal, Chelsea, Crystal Palace. If you'd bet at the beginning of the week that it would have been the Championship club that were left representing London in the Carling Cup semi-finals, then you'd have won - well, I don't know what you'd have won. Gambling is the only vice I've been spared.

Let's assume it would have been a lot.

If you'd bet that Darren Ambrose would have larruped home the first of goal of Palace's 2-1 victory at Old Trafford last night, I suspect you'd also have been buying the drinks this evening. Yet there it was. The ball left Ambrose's right foot like an anti-tank missile, gaining dip and swerve through the dank Manchester air and burying itself into the top left corner of Ben Amos's net.

It is moments like that which sell football around the world and give players memories that they cherish all their lives. I suspect that Ambrose will be waking up with a smile on his face every morning for the rest of his career, as the dream of that sweet strike fades from his mind. But it's not just Ambrose who can feel excited about last night's wonderful win.

The Carling Cup may not mean a great deal for the big sides but it has real significance for a club like Palace.

It's tempting to write down victories by Championship sides over Premier League ones in the competition but Palace's win at Old Trafford deserves a good hard trumpeting.

The ground may not have been full, the crowd may only have been a couple of notches above catatonic but the Eagles were not sucked into the torpor of the occasion.

They were resolute, organised and kept their cool even when the match went into extra-time. They refused to be monstered by the Manchester United myth (also known as the Clive Tyldesley doctrine) which states that any team managed by Sir Alex Ferguson must be allowed to score a late goal as reward for their, well, their reputation for scoring late goals.

Palace richly deserved their victory and United, as disorganised and somnolent as Chelsea appeared against Liverpool on Tuesday night, deserved to be dumped out. Palace earned the right to fly London's colours in the Carling Cup semi-finals. All power to them.

At Stamford Bridge, Kenny Dalglish said that the Carling Cup has been "cheapened by the actions of the people who run it". You can be sure that it doesn't feel cheap to Palace - or for that matter, to Cardiff City.

Cardiff have relatively recent experience of a cup run, having lost the FA Cup Final in 2008 to Portsmouth; but this season will be the first time in a decade that Palace have made it to the semi-finals of any competition. Moreover, the fact that the two sides are paired in the last four means that there will definitely be a non-Premier League team at Wembley in February, playing either Liverpool or Manchester City. That is worth whistling about.

Will Manchester United give a flying one about being dumped out of the fourth-most important competition on their roster?

Absolutely not. Ferguson called it "not a United performance" and turned on the closest thing he has to crocodile tears when he apologised to his supporters. (This rare sight equates to a slight softening of his blotchy chops, a woebegone shake of the head and the kind of affected contrition that suggests someone will be taking a most ghastly kicking behind the scenes.)

But the blunt reality is that for a club chasing the Premier League title and hoping for a run on the Champions League, any fixture that can be whittled out of the calendar is a relief.

United have better things to be doing than messing about in a cup competition that they declared themselves done with back in 1994 against Port Vale, when Ferguson sent out a team including relative unknowns such as Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Keith Gillespie, David May and Nicky Butt.

Since then most of the biggest clubs have followed their lead. And in a strange way, football feels better for it today. Rare indeed is the appearance of a team like Cardiff or Palace in the later rounds of the FA Cup. The Carling Cup, however, gives the lesser teams in English football a bit of a chance. All power to them and to it.